The GM chapter II: the H2 and its own plant

2002 – 2009

A second plant on McKinley: The 1999 agreements obliged AM General to build a new facility for the H2, and it rose beside the military plant: the AM General Commercial Assembly Plant, at 12900 McKinley Highway. Its size is carried two ways — 673,000 square feet in the reference works, 675,000 square feet in AM General's own later releases — and both figures are printed as they stand. Where the military plant was a converted components building, the Commercial Assembly Plant was the one purpose-built vehicle plant of the whole Mishawaka story: body shop, paint shop, and general assembly under one roof, built for a single model on a single contract.

The vehicle: The H2 was GM's design, not AM General's: a Hummer in form, built on modified GM GMT820 truck underpinnings, and assembled by AM General under contract from General Motors. Production ran from 2002 to January 2009, for model years 2003 through 2009. A boundary line belongs here: from 2004 or 2006 — the accounts differ — the H2 was also assembled under license at Kaliningrad, Russia, by Avtotor, until 2009; the Mishawaka plant was the model's home and its volume source, not its only line. United States sales, on the marque archive's reconciled table, show the H2's course: 23,213 sold in 2005, 17,107 in 2006, 12,431 in 2007, and 1,513 in the collapse year of 2009. The archive reconciles model-against-brand sales for selected years only, and no sourced total build figure for the H2 stands in the record pulled for this section; the gap is named in the pass note rather than filled.

What the plant meant: For Mishawaka the H2 plant doubled the works. Through the middle 2000s the city held both of the Hummer brand's AM General products — the military Humvee and H1 in Plant 1, the H2 in the Commercial Assembly Plant — at the moment of the brand's greatest public visibility. The dependence cut the other way as well: the commercial plant had one customer, one model, and no military work to fall back on, a structure whose consequences arrived in January 2009.

Sources:

1. Hummer H2 reference history and production-facilities lists — GM design on GMT820 underpinnings, AM General contract assembly at Mishawaka, production 2002 to January 2009, the 673,000-square-foot figure, the Avtotor Kaliningrad assembly.
2. AM General press release, 5 September 2013 — the Commercial Assembly Plant at 675,000 square feet.
3. GM Hummer Archive — reconciled United States H2 sales for 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2009; facility description of body shop, paint shop, and assembly.